Talking points

From the magazine

If anyone wondered whether Justice Clarence Thomas was still bitter, said Edward Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times, wonder no more. Thomas this week released his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, chronicling his “amazing journey from crushing poverty” in rural Georgia to the pinnacle of power. But this is not merely a stirring life story. It’s a full-throated counterattack by a sitting Supreme Court justice on the liberal “mob” that opposed his nomination 15 years ago. Thomas, now 59, revisits the sexual harassment charges a former subordinate, Anita Hill, made during his confirmation hearings, portraying her as an unstable liar. Liberal Democrats and the press tried to destroy him, he says, because as a fiercely independent conservative, he did not fit their stereotype of a black man. “The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns,” Thomas writes. “Its weapons were smooth-tongue lies spoken into microphones … But it was a mob all the same, and its purpose—to keep the black man in his place—was unchanged.”

This man’s persecution complex knows no bounds, said Tim Grieve in Salon.com. Thomas actually likens himself to the fictional blacks in To Kill a Mockingbird and Native Son who were wrongly accused of raping white women. He doesn’t seem to care that his accuser was black, and finds no irony in the fact that as the court’s most conservative member, Thomas has relentlessly sought to limit the rights of the accused and to strike down affirmative action. “How can a justice with such a keen sense of his own persecution be so blind to that of others?” Clearly, Thomas has “issues,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. He’s convinced that his accomplishments were “tainted” by affirmative action. His solution, apparently, is to “save future generations of disadvantaged minorities from the indignity and shame of a Yale law degree.”

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Mock him if you will, said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. But Thomas’ own life experience is not so easily dismissed. Thomas notes that when he went on job interviews after law school, “people assumed he wasn’t as talented as his peers because of affirmative action.” That’s one downside of affirmative action that liberals would rather not ponder. Calling Thomas “bitter” or “angry,” said Rebecca Hagelin in Townhall.com, is just another attempt to discredit this formidable man’s accomplishments. Wouldn’t you be bitter if someone tried to destroy you, your family, and your reputation because you insisted on being judged as an individual—not as a member of a race?